A deeply-synthesized, opinionated reference distilled from five canonical sources:

donnemartin/system-design-primer ·

ByteByteGoHq/system-design-101 ·

karanpratapsingh/system-design ·

ashishps1/awesome-system-design-resources ·

binhnguyennus/awesome-scalability

Use it as: a study guide for interviews, a checklist for design reviews, and a vocabulary for cross-team discussions.

Table of Contents

📖 How to Use This Playbook

🧠 The System Design Mindset

🔑 Core Mental Models

🎯 The Interview Framework (RAPID-S)

🔢 Back-of-Envelope Math

🌐 Networking Fundamentals

🌍 DNS, CDN, and Proxies

⚖️ Load Balancing & API Gateways

🗄️ Databases: Pick Your Engine

🔀 Replication, Sharding, Federation

🔒 Consistency, Transactions & Isolation

⚡ Caching

📨 Asynchronous Communication

🔌 API Design

🏗️ Architectural Patterns

🕸️ Distributed Systems Primitives

🛡️ Reliability & Resilience Patterns

📊 Observability, SLA/SLO/SLI

🔐 Security

📈 Capacity Planning & Scaling Playbook

🏭 Data Engineering &…